


A Crooked Love In A Straight Line Down

by untune_the_sky



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Divergence, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate - Words, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Various Canons Smooshed Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 21:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6301795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untune_the_sky/pseuds/untune_the_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natalia Romanova and Yelena Belova, both groomed from the age of four to become the Soviet Union’s best spies and assassins, were twelve when they met the Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Crooked Love In A Straight Line Down

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Michael for giving this a once over for me. The title of the song is taken from Taylor Swift's "I Wish You Would." It's a very catchy song, and some of the lyrics really fit this story. My brain dropped this on me a while back, but I just now got around to polishing it up a bit. :) Comments are always welcome!

Natalia was six when she was deemed an exceptional candidate for the Red Room’s Black Widow program. She was one of eight to make it that far, the other twenty of their starting class having ‘gone home.’ Natalia was very certain that she did not want to go home — not that she remembered what her home had been like, of course. She had no memories beyond a vague impression of shadowy figures, bright light coming through a window, a woman’s voice humming tunelessly and soft, and being so cold she felt warm.

She was six when Miss Emke, blonde with eyes so blue it was like looking into the sky sometimes, took her away from her classmates.

“Natasha,” she said, her voice full of flat, American vowels.

“Yes, Miss Emke?” Natalia could make her vowels flat, too. She had learned by watching Western cartoons over and over again.

Miss Emke crouched in front of her, skin pale and lovely. She was everything Natalia wanted to be when she grew up — fierce and talented and so, so beautiful.

“Listen to me very carefully, Natasha,” Miss Emke said. Natalia nodded, her expression serious. Miss Emke reached out and took her hands, her fingers long and fine-boned compared to Natalia’s. “What do you see when you look at my hands, child?”

This had to be a trick question. The teachers liked trick questions. They liked to trip the students up, make them say the wrong thing. Inevitably, when you said the wrong thing, you got sent home. So Natalia held her tongue and very carefully studied Miss Emke’s hands.

After several moments of silence, Miss Emke quirked her red-lipped mouth up on one side. “This is not a test, Natasha. Tell me what you see.”

“I see... hands, Miss Emke,” Natalia said.

“What do you see on my hands, Natasha?”

“Nothing, Miss Emke,” Natalia said, confused.

“You will never see anything on my hands,” Miss Emke said. “And you will never see anything on your own. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t stained.”

Held captive by her favorite instructor’s seemingly spotless hands, Natalia’s voice shook as she whispered, “With what?”

“With blood, spiderling,” Miss Emke answered. Natalia shook her head, but Miss Emke continued, her voice firm as she repeated, “Listen to me very carefully, Natasha. This is important. You have words, don’t you?”

Natalia nodded. She had been told that the words appeared on her rib cage the day she was born. They wrapped around her left side, ending at the small of her back. Rather than looking overlarge and unwieldy, Natalia’s words seemed delicate, the handwriting almost old fashioned.

“Tomorrow one of your teachers will come. They will take you to see the doctor. They will put you to sleep. When you wake up again, you won’t have your words any longer,” Miss Emke said.

“But... why?” Natalia asked. She liked her words. The letters were all proportionate and they curled into loops for the H’s and G’s. They were pretty.

“The words are a weakness,” Miss Emke said. “That is what your other teachers believe.” Miss Emke’s hands were shaking now, and she released Natalia’s so that she could rub them together. “I want you to remember what your words are, though. You _must_ remember them. Do you know what they are? Tell me.”

“‘Good morning, little spider. Let’s see what else the Red Room’s finest has to offer.’” Natalia whispered. The thought of not having her words anymore made goosebumps break out on her shoulders and down her back.

“Just so,” Miss Emke said, nodding. “You remember those words. When you hear them, you must be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” Natalia asked, beginning to be truly frightened now.

“Your teachers will ask you to hurt the person who said them,” Miss Emke replied.

“Hurt them?”

The corners of Miss Emke’s lips pinched and turned downward. “Yes, Natasha. They will ask you to hurt them — to kill them. But I want you to know... I want you to know that killing that person is not the only option.”

“Why would they do that?”

“The Red Room demands absolute loyalty — they don’t want you to love anyone more than you love them.”

“Love is for children,” Natalia replied, the words automatic.

“And you are a child, Natasha. For a little while longer, at least. But one day, you won’t be. And one day, you’ll have to choose between the person who says those words to you and the Red Room,” Miss Emke said.

“Yes, Miss Emke,” Natalia said.

“It will not be an easy choice.”

“Did you have to decide, too, Miss Emke?”

“I did,” Miss Emke said, nodding. “I chose the Red Room.”

“Oh,” Natalia said, realizing with a sudden jolt what that meant. “You... you hurt the person who said your words?”

Miss Emke swallowed harshly, but she nodded. “Yes, Natasha. I did.” Her voice was soft but full of an anger that it would take Natalia decades to fully understand. Miss Emke continued, “I regret that decision every day. Were it not for you, I would regret every decision I have ever made. But now... now they are going to take you from me, as well.”

“I’m going away?” Natalia asked, unable to suppress the tremor in her voice.

“ _I_ am going away,” Miss Emke answered. “I might not come back. I will try to, but I might not be able to return.”

“I’ll miss you, Miss Emke,” Natalia said.

Miss Emke tsked, reaching out to cup Natalia’s cheeks in her hands. “Love is for children, Natasha. I am not a child.” She exhaled a slow breath. “But I’ll miss you, as well. Now, what is it you’re going to do for me?”

“Remember my words.”

“And they are?”

“‘Good morning, little spider. Let’s see what else the Red Room’s finest has to offer.’”

“Never, ever forget those words,” Miss Emke said.

“I won’t, Miss Emke.”

“Hurry back to the others, now,” Miss Emke whispered. “Sleep well, spiderling. Tomorrow will come quickly.”

When her teacher came to get her the next morning, Natalia was already awake.

When her teacher took her to the doctor, Natalia did not question it.

When her teacher woke her after the procedure, Natalia did not complain. Her left side and lower back were full of a sharp pain, an ache that made it difficult to move. Every motion pulled the stitches. But she moved. She walked. She ran. She fought each of the other girls in her class.

Years passed.

Miss Emke never came back.

The physical pain ebbed. The metaphysical one did not, but Natalia had no name for it. It was simply the dull throb of something important that was gone, irrevocably missing.

The number of Black Widow candidates in her class began to dwindle — from eight to six, from six to three, from three to two.

Natalia Romanova and Yelena Belova, both groomed from the age of four to become the Soviet Union’s best spies and assassins, were twelve when they met the Winter Soldier.

The day began as every other day began — wake, wait to be uncuffed from the bed, eat. And that was when routine shifted into something new and strange. From breakfast, they went to the training room rather than the classroom. There was a man there, one they did not know, and Natalia could feel Yelena casting a considering glance in her direction.

She did not return it.

She was aware, as always, of her surroundings. She had to be. Danger lurked in the shadowy cracks and crevasses of the Red Room’s hallowed halls.

The man, dressed all in black, did not speak. He gestured, a quick jerk of his left hand, and metal glinted. But Natalia couldn’t let herself be distracted by the metal. The gesture was familiar — she turned, almost like a marionette, and fell into a fighting stance. Yelena was but a moment behind her in the movement, but it was a moment of which Natalia took full advantage.

It was vicious, the fight between herself and Yelena. It was a thing of grace, but also a thing of fear and desperation. The last time such a gesture was given, Natalia had broken Olya’s neck. But Natalia couldn’t focus on that now. She had to focus on winning — because to lose meant to die.

Ultimately, it didn’t come to that.

Natalia had Yelena in a vice-like chokehold, waiting only for the appropriate signal to end the other girl’s life. She thought she understood, a little, what Miss Emke had meant when she said her hands were stained with blood.

The signal never came.

The man in black turned on his heel and exited the training room through a door that led to other training rooms. Their teacher stepped forward, gesturing for Natalia to release Yelena and follow the man.

Natalia did as instructed.

Natalia always did as instructed.

He was waiting for her in the hallway just outside the first training room. For one precious moment, they were alone unguarded — unobserved.

“Good morning, little spider. Let’s see what else the Red Room’s finest has to offer.”

The words rained down on her like artillery shells, the vowels oddly flat, but Natalia had been trained to reveal nothing. It was one of the first lessons learned in the Red Room.

This was the moment Miss Emke had warned her about.

She had to make the decision, had to choose — the Red Room or the man who spoke her words.

The Red Room was her life’s blood.

The Red Room was mother, father, sister, brother.

The Red Room provided.

The Red Room expected complete loyalty.

Love was for children.

Natalia was no longer a child.

But Natalia still missed Miss Emke sometimes, in the watery hours before dawn.

Natalia thought perhaps it wasn’t love. Perhaps it was something that ran deeper than love. Love could be pulled on like a coat. Love could be used against you. Love could twist someone into knots and leave them ripe for manipulation.

The man in black was not someone to love, but Natalia believed, hanging in that moment, that whatever it meant when he spoke her words, it ran deeper than love, too.

So Natalia took a slow breath and nodded, some instinct she didn’t quite understand but which she trusted urging her to hold her silence.

And so it went.

Natalia learned hand-to-hand combat and infiltration techniques from the Winter Soldier himself — on and off, once a month or so. Often less. She took instruction, soaking up his criticism and his sparse praise like a sponge — and throughout each session, she spoke not a single word to him. There was always someone else present. Natalia made sure to address them, if she could communicate in no other way.

The Winter Soldier didn’t seem to mind.

When she was seventeen, he went away, as quietly as he had arrived. One day, he simply did not appear for her training session. Natalia was taken to see the doctor. They put her to sleep. When she awoke, she knew something else had been taken from her. It was a purely physical pain, deep in her abdomen, but she knew — and there was nothing she could do about it.

The next time they took her to the doctor, they didn’t bother putting her to sleep. She was awake for the injection. She was awake when whatever they injected her with burned through her veins, incinerating the person she had been and leaving someone else behind — not quite as vulnerable, not quite as weak.

That was in 1957.

Her first contact with the Winter Soldier afterward came in 2009.

The interim was a mess of stolen or implanted memories, missions, and relationships that didn’t actually exist outside the sanctity of her own mind. She worked for the Red Room. She worked for the KGB. She worked for whomever could pay her the most. Natalia Alianova Romanova killed people for a living, her hands drenched in blood that only she could see, and she was very, very good at it.

Had it not been for an archer, it’s possible Natalia would never have seen the man who spoke her words again. But Clinton Francis Barton — Hawkeye — was nothing if not oddly persuasive when given an opening. She gave him the opening because she knew, somewhere in the spaces between her sinews and synapses, that while he wasn’t enhanced, he just might be able to kill her.

Secrets held within secrets — Natalia’s life with SHIELD became a matryoshka doll. Who knew what, which lie had she told to whom — which truth? Trust was suddenly a non-transactional commodity for her. Who to trust? Who to believe? Fury won her over after Barton, but she refused to let anyone else in.

Love was for children.

Natalia hadn’t been a child in a very, very long time.

So it shocked her, the frisson of electricity that shot through her when Hill gave her the ballistics analysis for the slug they pulled out of the pavement after it went through her, through her engineer. She showed no reaction, gave nothing away, just nodded — and then she began to hunt him.

The KGB had fallen, taking the tattered remnants of the Red Room with it. Natalia had believed the Winter Soldier to be one of its many unnamed, sidelined assets left to rot in peace in a decrepit bunker somewhere. Was that not better than waking to find the world changed, his masters lost amongst the dreck of some other nameless, faceless organization? Part of her feared him even while another part of her longed to see him — to give him words of his own.

So Natalia tracked down every lead, every whisper of potential activity, every fragmented and unreliable description that she could get her hands on. She took six months of personal leave from SHIELD with no explanation, refusing to acknowledge the worry creasing Barton’s brow or the faint suspicion in Fury’s eyes.

It didn’t matter. Whoever had him knew precisely what the Winter Soldier was, what he was capable of, and they hid him accordingly. Tragic though it was, Natalia understood that he was a weapon to be aimed, nothing more. But she also knew that was not all he had ever been. There was a man there, somewhere, beneath the conditioning — a man who spoke in oddly flat vowels sometimes, just in certain words, like his mouth couldn’t make them sound any other way no matter how hard it tried.

Then one of Stark Industries’ Russian subsidiaries uncovered Captain America in the Arctic; they thawed him and found a heartbeat. So two years after the man who spoke her words shot through her to end his target, she halted her search and assisted an American national icon and war hero defeat an army of aliens flying through a portal in the sky. The fact that the portal’s creator happened to have taken Barton was an unfortunate fact, one that Natalia was more than happy to help rectify. Cognitive recalibration accomplished, she expected to return to her search for the Winter Soldier after the Battle of New York and the Chitauri’s aborted invasion attempt.

She did not.

Instead, she found herself helping Steven Grant Rogers acclimate to the twenty-first century. Another matryoshka doll nested inside all of the others.

Her lies unraveled when they discovered Hydra secreted within SHIELD. Every half-truth she’d ever murmured — every throat she’d so carefully circled with her garrote — was now suspect. Had they deserved the death she brought them? She would never truly know. The best she could do now was carry on — as she had always carried on. As she always would.

Until the Winter Soldier came for Steve.

Until Steve unmasked the Winter Soldier.

Until Natalia found that Hydra had held the Winter Soldier’s reins once the KGB fell.

No one was holding them now.

Bound and determined to find him, Steve set out with Sam on what Natalia was sure would be a frustratingly fruitless manhunt.

Natalia knew that if they succeeded where Hydra had ensured she would fail, that meeting would not end well. Viewed from the outside, she could see the Winter Soldier’s conditioning breaking down. She watched the footage from the helicarrier as he fought Steve. She read his body language like a book, her face expressionless, and then quirked a brow at Hill before walking out the door of Stark Tower — now Avengers Tower — to begin the next phase of her life.

The Winter Soldier did not want to be found, so Steve and Sam did not find him.

Natalia waited.

It took him three years and approximately eight months to make his play. When he did, she was ready.

“Good morning, little spider. Let’s see what else the Red Room’s finest has to offer.”

The words echoed through time, through history, through Natalia’s mind. She didn’t tense, she didn’t react beyond carefully putting her grocery bags down. If he’d intended to kill her, she knew she’d already be dead. Allowing her to free her hands was either a ploy to leave her feeling over confident... or, more likely, he knew he could take her down, regardless of her preparation.

Still, Natalia had had decades to consider this meeting. The thin, barely-there scar that curved around her left side from her rib cage and ended at the base of her spine throbbed.

“Good morning, soldier. I’m making eggs and toast, but I bought bacon if you’d like some.”

He froze.

She smiled.


End file.
